BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

New Product Intelligence Platform 💡 

Small talk, big ideas

Available Domain: Innovinsights.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Coming up with new, innovative products and ideas is hard. Trust us…we know. Even the biggest and best companies in the world struggle with this. Like Apple…

But here’s the thing. For large business becoming multi-product can be the difference between success and failure. No iconic company was built off just one product. So businesses need a way to generate new product ideas. And we have the answer.

Market Size: The global business intelligence platforms market size was $7.1bn in 2023

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform which analyzes sales and customer service teams communications with customers to uncover new product opportunities

How it Works:

• The platform connects with various communication channels within companies (email, chat logs, call transcripts, CRM notes etc.)

• It analyzes the data to identify common themes, pain points, and feature requests, using sentiment analysis to gauge customer satisfaction and areas of frustration

• The platform then detects emerging patterns and recurring issues in customer communications and ranks potential product ideas based on frequency of mention, sentiment, and overall business impact

• These findings are presented through interactive charts and graphs which allow users to drill down into specific data points or customer segments

Go-to-market: Identify a pool of single product businesses who need to identify their next product. Build from there.

Business Model: Monthly subscription

Startup Costs: You’ll need a very capable engineer to build this out which could incur some cost

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Sell to a larger product management software platform, like monday.com

Exit Multiple: As of Q1 2024, industry reports cited SaaS revenue multiples sitting at c.5.9x

TOGETHER WITH NAME.COM

Domain + Email + Website = Covered

Let's paint a picture.

You're at your desk. You know you're destined to do something BIG.

So...you subscribe to Half Baked and find an idea to start.

What then? Well...you buy a domain, register an email and make a landing page website.

How? With Name.com, its easy.

Buy your domain, register your email and build your website all in the one place.

Is it good? Don't ask us, ask the 330,000 entrepreneurs that trust them for their entire web stack.

Sign up in the next 72 hours and you'll get 50% off a yearly plans + a free domain.

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Junk Drawer Starter Kit

If you’re lucky enough to have bought a new home recently firstly, you’re a lucky SOB. But we all know a house isn’t a home unless it has a random junk drawer in it.

Well with this junk drawer kit you can add make your house feel more homely instantly.

Coming soon to a store near you.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Founder Mode

Whenever Paul Graham writes an essay it causes quite a stir. And his latest essay, Founder Mode, is no exception. It details Paul’s thoughts on the difference between “founder mode” and “manager mode” which is summarized here:

Business Ideas

• Founder Mode OS: A software platform providing an OS for founders to run their businesses in founder mode

• Management Style Research Platform: A platform which researches different management styles of successful founders and sells the learnings to CEOs

THE MONEYSHOT

From College Professor to $10bn Founder

Many college professors, even those who teach entrepreneurship, have never run a business in their life.

But this college professor, after inventing a game-changing technology that he sold to Google, left academia behind to found a $10bn business.

This is his story.

Luis von Ahn, who was born and raised in Guatemala City fell in love with technology when he was 8 and his mother bought him a Commodore 64 computer, igniting a life-long passion with technoology.

Then at the age of 17, Luis moved to the United States to study mathematics at Duke. But getting to the States was far from easy. He had to spend more than $1,200 to fly to El Salvador to take the TOEFL (english language test), an experience that stayed with him.

But Luis thrived in academia and after his undergrad he spent 5 years doing his PhD in Computer Science…which was a banger. His PhD was groundbreaking (and complicated) but long story short he developed a game as part of his thesis (the ESP Game) which Google licensed from him in the form of the Google Image Labeler which they used to improve the accuracy of Google Image Search.

Not only this but 2 years later in 2007 he invented reCAPTCHA, those super annoying tests to tell humans and bots apart on websites. Google acquired this technology from Luis for an undisclosed amount, but he said was in the $10m - $100m range (pretty wide range there Luis).

After all of this success you might think that Luis would stay in academia for life. But he still couldn’t shake that core memory of being forced to take the TOEFL at huge cost to himself. He thought the language learning market was ripe for disruption.

So in 2009 Luis, along with his student Severin Hacker (great name for an engineer), began developing a platform that would make language learning free and accessible to everyone.

So 2 years later, after raising $3.3m, they launched their business.

They founded Duolingo.

Duolingo launched a private beta in November 2011, accumulating a waiting list of more than 300,000 people. It launched to the general public 6 months later at which point the waiting list had grown to around 500,000 people.

Luis wanted the platform to be free, so they came up with a unique business model. The platform was a crowdsourced translation service where users could contribute to the translation of real-world content, which Duolingo could then sell to companies like CNN and BuzzFeed.

The platform continued to grow like a rocketship, raising $15m in 2012, $20m in 2014 and $45m in 2015 to support their growth.

User numbers were growing well, but revenue wasn’t, so the team pivoted away from the translation business model to earning revenue through advertising, subscription revenue and the Duolingo English Test certification program.

By 2020, the site had over 300 million users worldwide, making it the most popular language-learning platform globally. The company's success attracted significant investment, and in 2021, Duolingo went public on the NASDAQ at a $5bn valuation.

Today the platform is worth $10bn and is still a juggernaut in the language learning space.

All of which goes to show that you can build a huge business out of solving your own problem, exactly like Luis did.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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